Soon after the ABVP's recent attack on students and teachers at the Delhi University's Ramjas College, Chetan Bhagat waded thickly into the mix as is his wont. One of our readers, a former member of the ICF collective responds:
And here is the most distasteful article, written by someone who never made it to DU, about how DU works. I wish it did work the way Mr Chetan Bhagat seems to think it does. I wish I could "do adda in the campus lawns" instead of attending classes, reading the entire library for a single term paper or exam, or even a test. And I really wish I could party as much as he thinks DU students do.
As far as mugging up before exams goes, well, all the best to people like you who think that arts subjects entail mugging. Life is all too beautiful inside your head, and I hate to break the illusion but in all these years I never could mug up for an exam and get marks. Quite unlike a number of science students at your esteemed IITs who have no choice but to mug up the quantities of information crammed inside their books. For us, exams are a test of knowledge and not books; we've spent days reading everything we laid eyes on simply to answer a single question; as individuals, not machines reproduced by repeating the same formulas. Our midterms or exams are a test of our ideas, opinions and thought process, not of how many things we could cram in the time we were given. You cannot form ideas, opinions and knowledge based on a single book or website.
I am sorry that your idea of education is limited to whatever will earn you a lot of money and help you make a career, but DU taught us that to be educated means to understand the world around you, stand against wrongs, raise your voice, bring change. So yes, the system has failed us terribly, when someone as narrow-minded as you can call themselves educated and feel free to comment on students who, for once, are politically aware and want to bring change. I am quite sure that no one in your IITs told you that change has been worked, time and time again, by students marching against what is wrong.
It is because of politically aware students who cared, about bringing change and making things better, rather than focusing on the goal of earning money, that you are sitting right now in the cozy comfort of your home, in a free country with democratic laws, and writing bullshit about things you have no idea about. I am guessing the IITs also failed to teach you that you must search – extensively – before forming an opinion, putting up a comment or criticising others.
So, thank you so much for the suggestion, but a hundred, a thousand students like me are quite glad that DU provides us a real education, and the much-needed freedom to let our minds grow in the way we want; that it doesn't suppress us, turning us into machines unable to think about anything happening in the world. I wish people like you, writing columns for national dailies, had been educated instead of being turned into minting machines. Then, maybe, your opinion would have been substantive, well-informed, value-driven and intelligent rather than the terrible waste of time and space it is right now. My god I feel contaminated just from reading the stupidity spouted in your garbage piece.
